(.net) technology and society

February 28, 2007

Have you heard of VoIP fraud? As of tonight, I have. When I got home from work this evening, there was an Earthlink box sitting on my doorstep. I hadn't ordered anything from Earthlink, so I curiously popped the tape open and found hardware for a new VoIP account in my husband's name, and confirmation that our current telephone line would soon be cancelled. I quickly went through this series of reactions:

As friendly naggers noted, I wasn't blogging for the past couple of weeks. I actually took a disconnected vacation, visiting lovely Isla Mujeres down in Mexico for a couple of weeks - most of which time was spent at a yoga retreat, allowing me to guzzle down guacamole and margaritas guilt-free while getting tan and bendy. I do have one work-oriented anecdote from the trip, however:

The Nonprofit Technology Network's annual Nonprofit Technology Conference (I am on the steering committee) is seeking nominations for its inaugural "Innovation Plaza" highlighting best-of-breed use of technology by nonprofits. Nominated candidates must be a 501(c)(3) organization, and yes, you can nominate yourself. Selected candidates will be invited to demonstrate their application, thereby sharing best practices and earning exposure.

The NTC will be held in Washington, DC from April 4th - 6th. Folks interested in the Innovation Plaza can both get more info and apply online.

February 08, 2007

I stopped by Socialtext's monthly "Wiki Wednesday" hackathon yesterday. The premise? Free pizza and beer and internet, create what you will using Socialtext's open source technology. (Disclosure note: Omidyar Network is an investor in Socialtext.) Present at the end of the day and get some sort of freebie if you've got the most popular hack. Here are the entries from yesterday:

February 02, 2007

Tech support and testing are not the first market segment that comes to mind for DEMO. Several companies, however, introduced nuances inspired by Web 2.0 consumer paradigms.

Triumfant's Resolution Manager
identifies anomalies in a network computing environment, and then removes
them. The system can replace missing or corrupt files after filtering the network,
which isn't earth-shattering - what's potentially interesting is the peer-to-peer aspect; existing computer assets are treated as "donors" of healthy code.

Integrien predicts service slowdowns or outages with Alive 5.5, its integrity management software. By linking together events with the ability to learn and retain knowledge, Alive 5.5 can identify issues that lead to failure in advance of a problem occurring.

SupportSoft launched new PC tuneup and security services - System TuneUp and Security Audit. The interface is consumer-friendly and looks easy to use; the actual functionality appears very similar to AOL support tools/Defragger and Symantec security offerings, respectively.

SOASTA is a visual environment for application testing. The company posits that since most Web testing is either hand-built or narrow in focus, it can't handle real-world testing scenarios. SOASTA's solution is effectively a 'Final Cut approach' for unit testing, which interface style seemed more friendly than most testing tools.

SailPointCompliance IQ addresses risk management and compliance, not only by tracking user access privilieges, but also by bringing together multiple identity factors that create a total risk profile.

Of the DEMO offerings in this segment, SailPoint seemed to leverage Web 2.0 themes most effectively. In general, however, the lag between consumer and enterprise adoption of technologies/behavioral paradigms is still alive and kicking.

February 01, 2007

Chris Shipley is clearly feeling the power of the crowds nowadays - a startling number of startups are launching products and services that leverage collective knowledge, via either direct content contributions or the use of algorithms. Applications of collective wisdom here at DEMO 07 ranged from product recommendations, to architectural design, to identifying travel serendipity. The snapshot reviews are here, but I'll also reveal my personal favorites: Aggregate Knowledge, CircleUp, Digger, MyDesignIn, and PairUp.

Recommendations sharing

Aggregate Knowledgelets consumers tap into the wisdom of crowds. Overstock.com uses Aggregate Knowledge techology to recommend you those shirts in the discovery pane adjacent to the item description that you selected. The company also has a cool, Digg-like data visualization program for marketers. Best of all, their business model is based on success fees - when buyers order a recommended product, that's when the company makes money.

Trailfire is a new engine for
social discovery that uses the sticky note paradigm. Users can annotate
a Web page and link notes together as they wish. These 'trails' can be
either discovered by serendipity or shared with friends, and as others follow your path they can add to it
and make it more robust.

Crawling for answers

Attendio is an online event discovery service that recommends events based on what like-minded people are interested in. The company plans to differentiate by targeting groups, whether the PTA, a moms group, or a soccer league.

Boorah provides a crowd-based
recommendations engine. The company uses natural language technology to
sift through existing online content - e.g., searching for a great
restaurant recommendation, and getting one based on all crawled content
rather than a single site. Best-of lists, summaries, etc. are
automatically generated.

Digger infers the probable meaning of queries in an effort to return more relevant search results. The search engine uses linguistics, context, and learnings from previous searches. The company is doing a private beta currently, and I'm interested to see how it will compare to Powerset.

ZoomInfo launched PowerSearch, a business information search engine
that compiles individual profiles based upon the information that it
crawls. The product is targeted at sales and marketing professionals building their
pipeline, or perhaps executive recruiters. The company anticipates competing with both LinkedIn and Hoovers, and with over $10 million in revenue last year, it's already profitable. As a marketer, I like this, but as a target, it's a bit scary.

Content collaboration

Me.dium is a free browser
sidebar that enables 'social exploration' - in the company's words, to
"bring the human touch to the Web experience." Users can share and
compare their own Web surf activity with their friends' activity. Think StumbleUpon.

MyDesignIn is a social
network for home design. Interactive blueprints match information
scraped from Web sites and online catalogs to the CAD information built
into the DesignIn system. Users can bookmark products for
consideration. Vendors like it since their product get spec'd directly
into customer home designs. You could even lift an entire room design
from the Pottery Barn catalog and snap it in. Layouts created by other
system users can be streamed and shared to inform your own remodeling
project. Their tagline: "collect,
create, and collaborate." Since I have spent many months interviewing architects to help us
gut out what we affectionately call our own 'Winchester Mystery House,'
I will definitely look at using this service.

Reveal is designed for
searching and sharing unstructured data across workgroups. Both an
index of project documents and the actual content are maintained.
Information is both shared peer-to-peer and cached on the network for
persistent access, in the event the original source is no longer on the
network. The public beta will launch next month.

Zoho announced the addition of Zoho Notebook. Users can work with other users, and leverage existing content in the creation or something new. Their mantra is "create, aggregate, collaborate." These folks will face forbiddingly stiff competition - both from wiki systems, which are more inherently collaborative, and from existing vendors in the office productivity space.

Cat herding

The CircleUp alpha allows users to query a group of users, and get back a single, optimized result. In the demo, they walked through coordinating a ski trip; the system resolved who would leave when and from where, who was driving with whom, and how gear would be distributed amongst the various vehicles. Microformats are embedded in all of the results pages, so answer information can be uploaded into a number of applications. That's a lot of saved e-mail threads. CircleUp would be an amazing add-on to Evite or an online group calendar, and I suspect there are many applications (such as political polling or conjoint analysis) which are outside of the company's current execution plan.

Helium combines user-generated
content with peer review. Content worth reading rises to the top, so
the site owner knows which content is worth paying for. Helium Debate
rates online arguments on online discussions or blog posts, such that
highly-rated comments rise to the top, while lower-rated comments drop
to the bottom. This means that threads on Robin Williams'
acting ability won't be prominent in a discussion of what happens in
the afterlife. This would be a great complement to services like Digg
or Newvine in addition to lively shared interest communities. (Disclosure note: I manage Omidyar Network's investment in Digg.)

Nexo had one of my favorite demos of the week. They are pushing an anti-MySpace social networking platform, and created a Lindsay Lohan support group. The "Mean Girls" support group was able to add users, share resource links, do polls, IM, blog, share video, have threaded discussions, etc. etc. It's easy to use and add widgets, and you can lift the hood if you're more savvy. While an army of social networking sites came before Nexo, their offering provides a refreshingly easy and friendly interface.

PairUp allows you to actually
connect in meatspace with your social network. When you're planning a
trip, you enter your travel plans into the system - e.g., going to DEMO
in Palm Springs from 1/28 to 2/1 - and PairUp will tell you which of
your contacts will also be there. Users can limit who has access to
trip plans on a per-trip basis. You can set up trip alerts that let you
know if folks in your network will be in your part of town or at the
same conference, so you can decide if you want to reach out and
schedule a meeting. As someone who travels for business, I'd love to know who I could meet up with for dinner after a day of meetings.

Predictions

MyCurrency uses the wisdom of crowds to apply a smell test to housing valuations. There's an emphasis here on harnessing professionals - individual participants develop reputations based on their popularity, their contributions, and their accuracy/performance. What I like about this is that it answers the 'reputation for what?' question with high specificity, and weaker reputation offerings do not.

I'm helping to test out the new Platial MapKit that's in development, and so I thought I'd map out where DEMO 07 participating companies came from - please feel free to add to the map! (Disclosure note: I manage Omidyar Network's investment in Platial.) I've just added a few from the book, but others are entirely welcome to add themselves. Just remember that it's a live test of development software. ;)

Two of yesterday's exhibitors at DEMO 07 applied the IM behavioral paradigm to digital content delivery. Presuming that users have sufficient control to manage the intrusion of these popup windows - or even better, if these services could integrate into my existing instant messaging software - these services could improve the process of digital consumption.

ThePort Network has a social platform that powers branded online communities that include NASCAR and Cox Newspapers, among others. CEO Bob Cramer describes their new offering, blerts,
as an "itsy bitsy appetizer of an application" that allows users to
"break down the blogosphere into bite-sized chunks." (Or, in less
colorful semantics, a "graphics-based RSS alert utility.") Like an
instant message, a blert will pop up links in a small window when an
RSS feed updates. The service is free to the user. Unless part of a larger, branded offering, the company expects that blerts will be ad-driven, since they can link contextually to feed content.

Preclick provides photo services to
consumers through partnerships with Wal-Mart, Costco, and other major
retailers. (Hmm...since I've submitted many photos for print through
the Costco Web site, I must have used their service. If so, I can say
that it worked flawlessly.) Preclick IPM, launched yesterday, is entering
the same space as FilmLoop, RockYou, et al. Photos are sent in similar
fashion to an instant message, and so they avoid getting dumped into the Preview temp folder with banner ads from your Web browsing. With the company's strong private label
business, it likely has an inherent cash advantage over other startups and therefore it's worth keeping an eye on their performance.